By Yasser Alaskary
May 18, 2003

• As thousands more mass graves are discovered, Bremer, the new US administrator for Iraq, bans any members of the former regime into any public sector job and bans all Ba'athists from senior public sector positions.
  
  
• The arrival of Bremer indicates a substantial change in US policy towards Iraq by:
  • Recognising that failure to tackle predictable problems such as lawlessness has fuelled much of the chaos, the US Administrator vows to restore order
  • Cracking down on any remnants of support for Saddam Hussein
  • Scaling down the role of former-Iraqi opposition groups by reinstating the term 'authority' instead of 'government', which the Baghdad conference had adopted. This may represent a more realistic political outlook for the short-term since an interim government is unlikely to succeed in the current situation, however it does not address the issue of true representation which remains unattended to.
  • Speeding up the flow of food aid into Iraq
    
    
• The resignation of Clare Short confirms that there will be no political role for the UN. The immense bureacracy that engulfed the UN political reconstruction of Kosovo and Bosnia and the fact that it lacks the mechanisms for political reconstruction makes it unlikely that it can have any role in the political reconstruction of Iraq.
  
  
• The ending of UN sanctions came a step closer as a deal was reached with Germany over the draft UN Resolution and a deal with France looking optomistic. However, Russia remains the biggest obstacle to the resolution since it is set to lose billions of dollars worth of contracts that it had with Saddam Hussein. The G8 holds off from demanding Iraq repayments, freezing the debt until 2005, easing the country's path to economic recovery.
  
  
• The feared Cholera outbreak subsides as WHO is no longer worried about an epidemic in Iraq. This shows that Iraq's health system is more resilient than originally thought, which, if reflected more generally in Iraq, can be a good sign for the future.